Explanation:
Knowing when and where
to look, many enthusiastic sky gazers have
been able to spot the International Space Station (ISS) as
a bright star streaking
through the twilight.
But with a digital camera and a small telescope, recognizable
images
are possible too.
Astronomer Ricardo Borba
offers this example of the
Space Shuttle
Discovery docked with
the ISS, recorded this August from
his backyard in Ottawa, Canada.
Operating a digital video camera on an 8 inch reflecting telescope,
Borba tracked the Earth-orbiting pair by hand.
Unwanted telescope motion and atmospheric
blurring caused most of the
video frames to be indistinct, still the single
best frame (left) from his video sequence is amazingly sharp.
For comparison, he constructed a computer generated
image (right) showing the approximate orientation of the Shuttle/ISS docking
configuration based on
virtual
3D models available
on the web.